Etegami – hand-drawn postcards – is a popular Japanese art form. This is a display that was at the Kagoshima City post office.
Etegami – hand-drawn postcards – is a popular Japanese art form. This is a display that was at the Kagoshima City post office.27-Apr-2007 11:24Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.01666666 sec,
Etegami is a popular Japanese art form. You draw a picture on a postcard and send it to a friend. It’s especially popular during the change of seasons. I took the picture you see here in the Kagoshima City post office during our time there two years ago. This is a good explanation of etagami:
Etegami literally means “picture letter”. It is a picture and a message. There are really no rigid rules on how to draw etegami. Everything is freestyle. Just draw and write what you feel. No practice drawings, no rough drafts…lest you lose that moment of inspiration. The typical etegami usually consists of a drawing of something mundane, trivial…something you see in everyday life but normally take for granted. Take a closer look at the things you touch or see everyday. Find that most beautiful angle and draw it! The accompanying message is also up to you. It could be a proverb, an original poem, a straight sentence, or a wisecrack. Say whatever it is that is bursting out of you. Etegami is normally done on postcards. And, they are meant to be posted… the whole idea is you are sending a message straight from the heart.
Here’s an example of etegami by Maria. She drew a bowl of miso soup for her friend Masako:
Etegami (a hand drawn postcard) of a bowl of miso soup, drawn by Maria
I just finished repairing all the pictures in my blog posts from our 2007 “Golden Week” trip in Japan. I also took the opportunity to add a few nice photos I had overlooked before, like this one. I put the Golden Week posts in their own category, so you can see them all on one page. They’re among the best posts I wrote while in Japan, so take a look.
The kids at dusk at Hazard’s Beach08-Jul-2008 08:41SONY DSC-W55, 5.2, 18.9mm, 0.003125 sec, ISO 100
There’s nothing like the dead of winter for looking at summer photos. Since Maria wasn’t teaching last summer, and I was working for myself, we were able to spend a few weeks in Newport. Below are some highlights (if you want more, you can see all the Newport photos I uploaded for 2008). I was actually doing quite a bit of work while I was there: trying to drum up some retail distributors for the candy business (with no luck), selling candies at the Black Ships Festival (it was a good venue since we were selling Japanese candies), and doing web site work for two clients. Newport in July is a much more pleasant place to be than Philadelphia, and the boys always have a great time with their cousins, so it was a really nice trip.
Kai at Hazard’s Beach08-Jul-2008 07:27SONY DSC-W55, 8, 8.2mm, 0.005 sec, ISO 100
Eidan at Hazard’s Beach08-Jul-2008 08:00SONY DSC-W55, 5.2, 18.9mm, 0.00625 sec, ISO 100
Kai and Eidan getting pulled by Paul08-Jul-2008 08:14SONY DSC-W55, 9, 9.4mm, 0.01 sec, ISO 100
E’loise and Alexandar08-Jul-2008 08:22SONY DSC-W55, 7.1, 6.3mm, 0.008 sec, ISO 100
Alexander the sand monster08-Jul-2008 08:25SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.0025 sec, ISO 100
S’mores!22-Jul-2008 08:24SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.00625 sec, ISO 100
Roasting s’mores at Hazard’s Beach29-Jul-2008 07:32SONY DSC-W55, 7.1, 6.3mm, 0.005 sec, ISO 100
Eidan on the pier at Carnegie Abbey07-Jul-2008 01:06SONY DSC-W55, 8, 7.2mm, 0.005 sec, ISO 100
Alexandra at Carnegie Abbey07-Jul-2008 02:44SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.0025 sec, ISO 100
Kai in a magic show at Carnegie Abbey30-Jul-2008 08:33SONY DSC-W55, 5.2, 18.9mm, 0.01666666 sec, ISO 320
Michael and Maria at Carnegie Abbey30-Jul-2008 08:41SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.005 sec, ISO 100
Kai, Eidan, Matthew, and Alexandra30-Jul-2008 08:45SONY DSC-W55, 5.2, 18.9mm, 0.06666667 sec, ISO 320
Limited edition serigraph of Barack Obama, by Chaz Guest
Limited edition serigraph of Barack Obama, by Chaz Guest07-Jan-2009 16:12FUJIFILM FinePix S3Pro, 9.5, 28mm, 0.06666667 sec, ISO 100
My aunt in San Francisco runs the non-profit Health Through Art (HTA) program. By putting community created artwork in public spaces, HTA works to counteract substance abuse, racism, violence, and stereotyping. HTA has been offered a 5% commission on the sale of a limited edition serigraph of Barack Obama, if it is sold through one of their contacts (which would include me ). The serigraph is by Chaz Guest. The following is from Chaz’ representative in San Francisco:
Chaz first met President Obama when the then Senator Obama selected a portrait of Thurgood Marshall done by Chaz for his Capitol Hill office. Subsequently, Chaz was invited to be the emissary for President Obama to present one of the serigraphs in this series to the Mayor of Obama City, Japan just last month.
Kai’s been taking karate lessons 2-3 days a week for about 3 years now, at Mr. A’s karate school. Every time we go, he protests that he wants to stay home, but then he always has a great time when he gets there, and half the time doesn’t want to come home when the lesson is over. Back in September he graduated to blue belt, and then he quickly moved on to green belt in December. The videos above are from each graduation. Each graduate puts on a small demonstration. In September Kai did a “free form” demo (when the kids do free form demos, they can do whatever they want, which means they typically put on their best impersonation of Darth Maul). His demo elicited a collective gasp from the audience, when he discarded one of his weapons a little too spectacularly, flinging it into the seats (fortunately into an empty area, so no one got hurt). His performance in December was more subdued – he did a demo of one of the basic forms.
Below are pictures from the Haverford Township Day parade in October. Kai’s karate class marched in the parade. They periodically stopped along the route to do short demos for the audience, while the McCain campaign’s Straight Talk Express bus stalked closely behind us.
Kai with Mr. A
Kai with his karate class on Havertown day04-Oct-2008 23:56SONY DSC-W55, 7.1, 6.3mm, 0.003125 sec, ISO 100
Kai and his karate class doing a demo during the Havertown Day parade05-Oct-2008 00:31SONY DSC-W55, 7.1, 6.3mm, 0.00625 sec, ISO 100
The guy who owns this Delorian lives a few blocks away from me. He brought it out for the Havertown Day parade04-Oct-2008 22:59SONY DSC-W55, 7.1, 6.3mm, 0.01 sec, ISO 100
The Straight Talk Express hunted us on the parade route05-Oct-2008 00:02SONY DSC-W55, 8, 7.2mm, 0.00625 sec, ISO 100
I just couldn’t resist04-Oct-2008 23:02SONY DSC-W55, 7.1, 6.3mm, 0.008 sec, ISO 100
In my page header you’ll see there’s the linked photo for “Japan and Other Travel.” I recently decided to separate my “Japan” category from my “Travel” category, since I’ve been writing a fair number of posts about Japan that aren’t directly related to my travel there. But I still have plenty of posts that are about my time in Japan. So supporting that link in my header became a problem since WordPress doesn’t have the concept of multiple category parents (that is, WordPress can only display posts together on a page if they are in the same category, or have a common category parent).
One solution would be to use tags – to give all my “Travel” and “Japan” posts a common tag, and then link to the tag. That’s a perfectly good solution, but I decided against it because I’m lazy. I’m not currently using tags at all, and I don’t want to go back and update something like 150 posts with the new tag. Even if I wrote a database query to take care of the old posts in a single batch, I’d still have to always remember to put any new posts under the right category and the right tag. In addition to being lazy, I’m also forgetful.
Instead, I did the following:
I created a new top-level category named “Japan and Other Travel,” and I made a note of the category ID number assigned to it. This category will be an empty shell. I won’t ever assign any posts to it.
I created a new template in my theme named category-96.php. That number in the filename is the ID number that was assigned to the category. When displaying a category page, WordPress will automatically first look for a template specific to that category before moving on to a catch-all template.
category-96.php consists of nothing more than the following lines of code:
This uses some of the same code that’s in a post I wrote last year, about how to limit the categories that appear on your home page. Normally this category page would have nothing on it, since I don’t have any posts assigned to it. The call to query_posts() overrides that, and instead gets posts from the two category ID numbers that I passed to it. The $paged variable keeps track of which page someone is on if they click links to see older entries in the category. The require_once() call pulls in the index.php file for my theme to display the posts (if my theme had a category.php file, I would have used that instead).
And that’s it! The empty category doesn’t show up in my category list in the sidebar, because by default wp_list_categories() excludes categories with no posts in them.
I like this solution because now that I’ve set it up, I can go back to being lazy and forgetful.
My Jim Rice autographed baseball, from sometime in the late 1970s
My Jim Rice autographed baseball, from sometime in the late 1970s19-Jan-2009 09:29SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.025 sec, ISO 100
In 5 years of blogging I have never written about sports. This is the first time, and probably the last time, that I will.
I was a big baseball fan when I was a kid, but lost interest as I grew older. A few weeks ago I happened to notice in a daily news summary that my childhood baseball hero was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame: “…slugging outfielder Jim Rice, whose entire 16-year career was spent with the Boston Red Sox. In a vote of media members… [he] received the necessary 75 percent of the votes in his 15th and last year on the ballot.” Apparently it was quite controversial whether he was worthy of the Hall of Fame. I mainly remember him as a fearsome hitter, but also someone who was all business and didn’t get too hung up on himself as a celebrity. I also distinctly remember when “…he rushed into the stands to help a young boy who had been struck in the head by a line drive off the bat of Dave Stapleton. As other players and spectators watched, Rice left the dugout and entered the stands to help 4-year old Jonathan Keane, who was bleeding heavily. Rice carried the boy onto the field, through the Red Sox dugout and into the clubhouse, where the young boy could be treated by the team’s medical staff. Team doctor Arthur Pappas later said that Rice’s actions may have saved the boy’s life.” I don’t know how the Hall of Fame nomination system works, but everything I’ve read so far about his nomination has been all about statistics. I would think that character matters too.
The news sent me into my basement, rummaging through boxes, where I unearthed my baseball that was signed to me by Jim Rice when I was 9 or 10 years old. I’m not interested in selling it, but I think I will find a better place to display it now . And sitting next to it in the box, I found my old hand held video game, Head to Head Football. It still works! It’s essentially a glorified version of Pong, oriented horizontally instead of vertically. But judging by this early 80s commercial for it (you can find anything on YouTube), it must be the best game ever!
In reading about Rice I happened to come across some striking baseball news from Japan: a woman is now pitching for a minor league team. Baseball is taken at least as seriously in Japan as it is here, and like the US, the major and minor leagues have always been the exclusive domain of men, so this is a big story. And, of course, there’s a Red Sox connection:
Eri Yoshida, who left a line of male batters hitless in tryouts in November, recently signed on to become the first woman to play in professional baseball in Japan. Her drafting into pro ball has catapulted her from little-known high school jock to media darling, with camera crews following her daily rounds from calligraphy class to the dugout. Clips of her quirky side-armed pitch seem to be stock footage on nightly sports and news programs…
Yoshida began developing her signature pitch, the knuckle ball, a few years ago after her father showed her a video of Tim Wakefield, the longtime knuckle-baller for the Boston Red Sox. Her father thought she should develop a special skill to distinguish herself. She hoped the knuckle ball, which requires technique instead of power, would allow her to succeed in baseball despite her tiny frame. Her fluttering pitches top out at about 60 m.p.h., but are elusive to hit.
In discussing the story with Maria, I also learned a little more about Japanese culture. At first I thought it was insulting that the team’s coach referred to her as “Eri-chan.” Chan is a diminutive honorific that is used when addressing children (it’s like Mr. or Ms., but for kids). But Maria explained that in this context, it’s intended for cuteness and perhaps a bit of ribbing, but not in a sexist way. She said, for example, a chubby or boyish-looking male player might also be called “chan” by his teammates. I also thought it was odd that she showed up to her first press conference in her high school uniform. But this is in fact proper behavior – she’s fresh out of high school, and when you’re a student in Japan and you’re attending a formal event, you’re supposed to wear your school uniform.
Only towards the end of our time living in Tokyo did it finally dawn on me that I should see a Japanese baseball game. I ended up not having a chance. After we returned to the US, I came across this blog post describing an American’s first time at a Japanese baseball game, and it made me wish I had tried a little harder to make it to a game:
Having read before the game that Japanese baseball fans were an extremely noisy and energetic lot, I was surprised when, during the first half of the first inning, only quiet background chatter could be heard emanating from the crowd… Just as I was about to ask my friend why the crowd seemed so unenthusiastic, the third out was registered, and the Hanshin Tigers came up to bat.
And suddenly, every person in the crowd had their eyes riveted to the field. They were violently pounding together the plastic baseball-bat shaped noisemakers they had purchased outside the stadium in time with the drummers stationed in front of each section. They were chanting, singing. Giant flags were waved by excited fans. The cheering was accompanied by hand gestures, and both the gestures and cheers were different for each player. I was hit with such a deafening wall of sound that I stood dazed for a moment before grabbing my camera, snapping a few pictures of the crowd, and grabbing my own set of noisemakers and joining in.
…[A]t the beginning of the seventh inning, something interesting happened. Colorful balloons gradually started appearing in the hands of fans throughout the stadium… During what, in America, would have been the seventh inning stretch, the Tiger’s official theme song was again sung, and this time, it seemed almost everyone in the stadium sang along. After the singing was done, everyone quickly released their balloons. …I later learned that the release of balloons during the seventh inning stretch is a Hanshin Tigers tradition, performed by fans at both home and away games. Towards the end of the game, when it appeared certain the Tigers would be winning, the balloons began again to appear throughout the crowd, and when the final out was called for the Baystars, the sky was again momentarily filled with the colorful balloons.
Having launched their balloons for a second time in celebration of the Tigers’ victory, I assumed that the crowd would quickly begin to file out of the stadium. Instead, though, everyone stuck around for a good twenty minutes, singing songs of celebration and cheering their victorious team…
Whenever we make it back to Japan, going to a ball game is at the top of my to do list.
Etegami – hand-drawn postcards – is a popular Japanese art form. This is a display that was at the Kagoshima City post office.
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). The serigraph is by 
. And sitting next to it in the box, I found my old hand held video game, Head to Head Football. It still works! It’s essentially a glorified version of Pong, oriented horizontally instead of vertically. But judging by 
